What’s In A Name?: Sundance’s Three “American” Docs

What's In A Name?: Sundance's Three "American" Docs

In his book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered America, NealGabler writes that the American people “increasingly have come to regardtheir own lives as entertainment.” Proof of this statement can be foundin this year’s Documentary Competition at Sundance. Threefeature-length docs, “American Hollow,” “American Movie,” and “AmericanPimp” are set to premiere this week, offering three radically differentportraits of radically different Americans, and calling the definitionof “American” into question.

The world inhabited by the isolated, impoverished Appalachian familyprofiled in “American Hollow,” “seems a strange echo of our Americanheritage,” according to Rory Kennedy, award-winning producer-director ofsuch social issues docs as “Fire in Our House” and “Women of Substance.”The Bowling family, currently consisting of around forty members, haslived in the same hollow in Saul, Kentucky for over 100 years, survivingoff their land and paltry welfare checks when they come. In the hollow,family and hard work reign supreme.

Kennedy’s take on her subject is refreshing since the subject hasusually been portrayed as a source of humor, fear, and disdain inAmerican popular culture (see: “Deliverance,” “The Beverly Hillbillies“). To Kennedy, the Bowlings are part of an endangered Americanspecies who represent some of the nation’s oldest traditions and values.She believes, however that a lack of jobs and limited welfare supportwill force this increasingly impoverished people and their way of lifeinto a homogeneous, gentrified, modern American culture. Too often, shesays, “People like the Bowlings, are gradually lured down from the hillsto find work at modern malls and fast-food restaurants.” Asked to definethe word ‘hollow,’ Kennedy begins with a physical description of aravine between two mountains. “Also,” she says, “maybe it’s Americathat is hollow, pursuing modernization and these new technologies, andmoving away from family and nature.”

With “American Pimp,” the Hughes brothers, creators of the criticallyacclaimed urban dramas “Menace II Society” (1993) and “Dead Presidents“(1995), tackle the traditions, values, and lifestyles of a differentkind of American outsider, the black urban pimp. Despite the fact thatthis pimping population is barely recognized by mainstream Americanculture, Allen and Albert Hughes stress that these people and theirvocation are “strictly an American thing.”

The Hughes use extended conversations with around thirty pimps acrossAmerica, ranging in age from mid 20